Opportunity
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, our client, a national financial organization, wanted to understand internal and external experiences of the PPP loan forgiveness application process.
The client had seen forgiveness applications tapering off and struggled to shepherd their clients through the process successfully, so they looked to our team to help evaluate and simplify the current program. The client wanted to understand the experience of all entities involved in the process, including the primary website, the application itself, customer service outreach content, and customer service providers.
Role
Lead Researcher
Team Members
2 Content Strategists
1 Designer
1 Project Manager
Research Methods
Landscape Analysis
Experience Interviews
Heuristic review
Primary Research Objectives
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Understand the experience of customer-facing service providers, including their own pain points in trying to help customers and the biggest successes and challenges they heard from customers.
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Understand the customer experience of the loan forgiveness process, including successes, pain points, wants, and needs. Focusing especially on communication touchpoints, the “gray area” period between application submission and receipt of feedback or forgiveness, and expectations around forgiveness, support, and guidance.
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Identify processes, tactics, and educational guidelines other organizations are employing to make the PPP loan forgiveness application easier and simpler.
Research Deliverables
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Findings and directional recommendations for experience improvements based on interviews with customer service providers and customers.
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Exploration of the approach other organizations are taking to make the PPP process simple and accessible.
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Insights and recommendations from a heuristic evaluation of the application site/process.
Approach
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Conduct stakeholder interviews with client team members to ensure alignment on project goals.
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Applied Nielsen Norman heuristics to the application website to evaluate overall usability and generate recommendations for improvements.
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A thorough, features-level review of other organizations’ approaches to the PPP loan forgiveness process, including specific recommendations for integrating key approaches into the client process.
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In-depth interviews with customer service providers, who spoke to their own experiences as well as the experiences, pain points, and needs that they heard most frequently from their customers.
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In-depth interviews with customers who had already gone through the PPP loan forgiveness process, to understand what worked well and what they would like to see managed differently.
Client Impact
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The client was able to hear, for the first time, the most salient pain points impacting their customers as they went through the process of applying for PPP loan forgiveness, including the compounding stress of managing a small business during a pandemic.
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We provided specific, easy-to-implement suggestions for the website and educational content that allowed the client to make meaningful changes quickly.
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We gave the client guidance for simplifying government-provided documentation to make it more accessible and simpler to understand.
